Mullethead

I delight in seeing someone who still proudly sports a mullet. In fact, a highlight of last Saturday’s Farmers Market was spying a curly, two-toned mullet. (I reached for my cell phone to take a picture but this mullet was moving at a surprisingly fast pace, and I was slow on the draw, weighed down by all of our produce purchases.)

As fun as mullet hunting is, it’s almost as fun to actually rock a mullet yourself, and Halloween provides the perfect opportunity.

Mullet wigs are fairly easy to come by, but more crafty people may be able to customize any old wig into a variety of mullet shapes (go to www.mulletsgalore.com for ideas on colors and styles!). Remember the only rule is that it has to be short in the front and long in the back, or in mullet-lingo, business in the front, party in the back.

I suggest getting a few other items to take your mullet costume to a whole new level — a faded heavy metal t-shirt cut off at the sleeves, perhaps, or overalls also go well with a mullet wig.

My mullet costume includes a fairly standard mullet wig, a fanny pack (formerly owned and worn by my dad!), and what I firmly believe are the world’s worst jeans.

These jeans are acid washed, of course, and with dramatically tapered legs. They feature a high waist and an array of pleats. The pleats paired with the tapered leg draw extreme attention to one’s hips. There are no back pockets. Given all the other features, why bother with back pockets?!

I believe these incredible jeans cost me $3.50 at a jank Mission thift store. I can’t stop laughing when I wear them and in my experience, other people also find them highly entertaining.

Many people use Halloween as a time to release their Inner Slut, but I firmly believe that the more ridiculous a costume, the better. I have the most fun when I’m wearing something that I would never normally leave the house in. I can’t imagine a sexy Nurse or French maid have as much fun as I have in my mullet!

To the King Ad-Rock, on his birthday.

No Cars Go

San Francisco rewards those who walk.

So much of what makes the City special is so much easier to find on foot than in the car. You can’t drive down the neat little staircases that connect certain streets, like those on Macondray Lane, the inspiration for Barbary Lane in Tales of the City.

This is not Macondray Lane.

Your car won’t take you down the old concrete slides or into the community gardens. If you drove down Octavia St, you’d likely miss the homemade miniature golf course in Hayes Valley. And in a car, would you ever find the City’s best coffee, served out of an open garage on a narrow one-way street?

Of course, there are times when a SF walk is more of a urine-scented tour of passed out homeless people and assorted human and animal feces. But more often than not, you happen upon something special when you aren’t worried about finding a parking space or the time left in the parking meter.

If I didn’t live walking distance to BiRite Creamery, for instance, I probably would have only tasted one or two of their flavors rather than a whole host of them. And that would be a shame because they don’t always have cinnamon, the malted vanilla doesn’t always have peanut brittle in it, and only once this summer did they have a nectarine ice cream.

If we only went to Delfina Pizzeria once, we may have been discouraged by the wait for a table. But we walk down 18th street often enough to drop in if there are tables available and once, we lucked into a table on a night they were serving meatballs.

If we weren’t on foot, I doubt we’d have found Miette and tried so many of their crazy delicious licorices. And because we’ve made repeat visits to Miette, we got to see the homemade miniature golf course come to life and see Hayes Valley start to feel like a real neighborhood, rather than a cluster of design stores.

I didn’t immediately understand the joy of exploring the City without a car. I thought Mr. WholeHog was nuts when he got rid of his car after only a few months in SF. But he learned the City far faster than I did — even though I’d been here two years before he moved here.

There are times I think this should be a rule: when you move to San Francisco, you must go car-less, at least temporarily. Because if you explore SF without a car, you’re much more likely to fall in love with it. But, of course, the downside is that then you’ll never want to leave it.

Season’s Change When It Comes Their Time

San Francisco doesn’t have traditional seasons. We have wintry temps in July, and often get a few 80 degree days in February or March. But although the weather isn’t necessarily seasonal, by shopping regularly at the farmers market, we know when the seasons are changing because the food at the market changes.

We had our last corn a few weeks ago, and the only tomatoes left are early girls. Although there are still some raspberries and strawberries, the peaches and nectarines have been replaced by pears, persimmons and pomegranates.

I don’t transition easily to Fall. While I delight in seeing the first peaches come to the market, I just I don’t feel the same about turnips. I love all the crisp apples, but I can’t muster up much enthusiasm for the pear.

I assume others feel the same because as fall sinks in, the crowds of shoppers at the market diminish. You can walk more easily between stands, and this weekend, there was no line at all for the City’s best mexican food.

It helped me ease into Fall by thinking about buying Fall produce as a charitable act. I didn’t really feel like butternut squash and yams when I started buying them a few weeks ago from Eatwell Farm, after hearing that the farm’s spectacular tomato crop had been quarantined due to proximity to a Mediterranean fruit fly. Knowing the farm was struggling, I made sure to buy something from them each week. And I hope I helped them, because those squashes and yams helped me feel ready for Fall.

Of course, not all Fall foods pale in comparison to Summer’s bounty. In some cases, there are quite worthy substitutes. Sure, I loved the red flame grapes at Hamada, but now they’re selling Satsuma mandarin oranges.

I have a problem with Satsuma mandarin oranges and that is that I never seem to buy enough of them to satisfy my craving for them. They’re so delicious and easy to peel. When isn’t a good time for a Satsuma?! (The other problem is that I like to call them Satsumas – not mandarins, not oranges.)

I bought some of Hamada’s Satsumas, and ate them as I walked through the market, dropping the peels on to the rest of my weekly haul. At that moment, I didn’t really miss the peaches or the corn. I felt ready for citrus and for squash.

Rave: This American Life podcasts

I am one of the very few people in the world who wasn’t instantly enamored with the ipod. I got one, loaded it up with songs and promptly forgot all about it.

I thought I’d use it on MUNI but I was used to reading the New Yorker on my commute to work, provided there was room on the packed trains to actually pull out my copy and hold it in front of my face. If I remembered the ipod, it was usually out of batteries or else I spent most of my commute untangling the headphones. After a while, I simply left it at home.

If I cared little about the ipod, I cared even less about podcasts. I dismissed podcasts as something for the deeply nerdy. Besides, I’d rather use my ipod for music, I thought to myself. But then I learned that This American Life, a weekly NPR show, had a weekly podcast, and thus, I became enamored with the ipod and This American Life.

(Image from www.thislife.org)

Before the podcast, I didn’t regularly tune in to This American Life. I knew it was worth a listen since the show gave people like David Sedaris his start. But it airs on Saturdays in the middle of the day, and I’m not about to schedule my weekend around the radio. These days I only really listen to the radio in my car, and thankfully, I’m not in the car very often. The podcast was the perfect way for me to become a T.A.L. addict.

Now, each week, I look forward to the latest This American Life podcast as much as I look forward to receiving my New Yorker. I’m sure I seem like a crazy person on MUNI, chuckling at funny moments in an episode, or gasping at a surprising turn in someone’s story. Sometimes I don’t even mind the all-too-frequent MUNI delays because that means more time to listen to a particularly absorbing story.

These days, my New Yorkers are piling up – and that’s saying something since I think the New Yorker is one of the best things in life, up there with bacon and swimming in Lake Tahoe — and I no longer leave my ipod at home.

Sign up for the This American Life podcast here.

All I Know is that I Don’t Know

Many times when I was debating what I considered an important life decision, I’d hear that when the time came, I’d “just know” what was the right choice.

This proved to be extremely irritating advice, because I never “just knew.” When I toured college campuses during the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, people said I’d “just know” which one would be the right place for me. But I didn’t know. I waited for some sort of sign, but eventually I just made what seemed to be the most sensible decision.

There are people who say that they “just knew” when they met the person they would spend their life with, but I don’t recall feeling much of anything when I met Mr. WholeHog in Drivers Ed other than irritation that the teacher made the class sit in alphabetical order by last name.

And yet, even though I’ve never had much of a gut instinct, I sometimes imagine that I will visit a new place and “just know” that it’s where I should live.

It’s not that I don’t love San Francisco. But since I’ve spent all of my 30 years in Northern California, how can I can be sure that San Francisco is the right place for me?

I’m guilty of ridiculing people from high school who never left the town where they grew up, but how far, really, have I gone? I was born in the valley, moved to the foothills and went to college on the coast. I’ve pretty much been here ever since. My sister, on the other hand, went to college in Southern California, and after graduating, she went cross country.

My friend Amy is now in Maryland (where we visited her last month). She and her husband have lived in Montana, on the California coast and now they’re on the outskirts of DC. And they’ve seemed to be happy in every place.

Because I haven’t moved much, I try to use travel as a way to mentally check places off my Could I Live Here? List. But spending a few days in a new city assumes that I’ll “just know” that it’s right for me. And past experience has shown that this isn’t how I make decisions.

After all, I didn’t just know I’d love SF when I moved here. I thought it was just a good place to get my bearings after college. I didn’t expect it to feel so much like home.

In all likelihood, even though I’m happy in San Francisco, I’ll have to leave it eventually if we ever expect to own a home or have children. But I tell myself that we don’t have to move yet, so why worry? And I delude myself by thinking that when it’s time to go, I’ll just know.

Dahlia Garden

I’ve spent a lot of time in Golden Gate Park. As a kid, every visit to my grandparents involved trips to the aquarium or to the children’s playground with its excellent carousel. When I moved to SF after college, I lived only 3 blocks from the park. I ran in the park weekly, often traveling around Stowe Lake and up to the top of Strawberry Hill. Every sunny Inner Sunset day, I spent in the arboretum.

But until a good friend moved into an apartment at Stanyan and Fulton and introduced me to the Northeast corner of Golden Gate Park, I had no idea there was a dahlia garden.

Now I try to head to the dahlia garden at least once a year. It’s easy to find once you know where to look: just head to the Conservatory of Flowers and turn right. It’s that little fenced in area that may or may not be in bloom. Since it is quite disappointing to find simply a patch o’ dirt where you expect to find abundant flowers, go now while they are still in bloom.

It’s gorgeous. The different varieties of dahlias look like completely different flowers. Some are tightly packed with little curled petals; they look almost like a vibrant cabbage. Others are huge and showy with the longer, spiky petals.

The dahlia patch is just one example of what you can find tucked away in Golden Gate Park. The AIDS Memorial Grove is another often overlooked area. It’s so lovely, and yet most people just walk on by, heading to the nearby children’s playground, or the baseball fields at Big Rec.

One word of caution, though: I can’t promise that there will always be something as wonderful as a bunch of blooming dahlias to discover in the park. It was in the Rhododendron Dell years ago that a man exposed himself to me and I’m still upset about it (especially because the Rhododendron Dell is such a neat place, and now I have such unpleasant associations with it). But it was just one bad incident in years of very happy, fully-clothed moments in the park.

Cookbooks

The internet has become a good source for recipes and cooking instructions. In fact, some of my very favorite recipes are from the ‘net, but the web will never fully replace my cookbooks.

I love cookbooks. Even before I liked to cook, I liked to look through cookbooks. A good cookbook is a necessity in any kitchen, and yet it can be surprisingly hard to find to find a cookbook that you can turn to with almost any question or any ingredient. I feel lucky to have three such cookbooks.

The Zuni Café Cookbook – This cookbook garnered a lot of attention and from my experience, it deserves it all. The recipes are decidedly not 30 minute meals. This is a cookbook where the recipe for hamburgers starts with instructions for grinding your own meat. It’s exceedingly comprehensive and a great resource. I haven’t tried to make my own duck confit, but I know where I could find detailed instructions.

These are some of our very favorite meals.

Favorite Recipes –

• Pasta alla Carbonara – God damn it, this is good. Eggs, fresh ricotta, favas (such a brilliant replacement for peas!), and bacon. My kind of meal.
• Artichokes with Mint and Olives – This dish usually takes me to the end of my cooking rope. It takes longer than I ever expect and with more irritating steps than you can imagine, but the end result is so worth it. We make it every artichoke season.
• Chicken Bouillabase – Mr. WholeHog isn’t the biggest fan of chicken but this rich onion-y chicken soup won him over.
• The Famous Roast Chicken.

Gourmet – The giant yellow Gourmet cookbook has been criticized for not having any pictures, but what it lacks in pictures, it makes up for in its sheer number of recipes. Gourmet covers every meal from breakfast through dessert. This is my go-to when I have an ingredient I’m not sure what to do with or if I need some new ideas for pancakes or cookies.

Favorite Recipes –

• Gingerbread Pancakes
• Brown Buttered Corn
• Fried Eggs and Warm Lentil Salad

The Cheese Board Collective Works – I had to actually look up the official name of this cookbook since to me, it’s just the Arizmendi cookbook. (A quick history: The Cheeseboard in Berkeley begat Arizmendi Bakery, once my cherished neighborhood bakery and now one of the two best bakeries in SF.)

Arizmendi makes a terrific pizza, rustic scones (their corn-cherry is a classic) and I can’t explain what makes their brioche knots so addictive, you’ll just have to try them yourself. The recipes for all of these treats are found in this cookbook, as well as recipes for bread dought and pizza dough, cookies and, randomly, two salsa recipes. You’ll also find information on cooperatives and on cheese here.

I’ve mainly stuck with the scone and muffin recipes. I particularly like that they give instructions for both mixing by hand and with a mixer, since I avoid using machines whenever possible.

Favorite Recipes –

• Maple Pecan Scones – The scones are glazed in a mixture of maple syrup and powdered sugar, so you know they’re delicious. Don’t sub in even a little whole wheat flour as we did once. Baking is no time for nutrition!
• Pear Pecan Muffins

All images from Powells, the best online source for books. These books can be purchased via Powells.com, of course, or from your local, independent bookstore.

Hardly Strictly

Despite my fear of banjos and hillbillies, almost every year, I enjoy three days in Golden Gate Park at the Hardly, Strictly Bluegrass Festival.

I know what you’re thinking: bluegrass?! Now I admit that I can appreciate a bluegrass harmony, even if it includes an Appalachian accent and some fiddle playing, but generally the key word – for me, at least — is hardly.

There are plenty of musicians at Hardly Strictly that aren’t considered bluegrass. Like Emmylou Harris, who closes out the festival every year on Sunday evening, filling Speedway Meadow with her incredible voice.

I know that bluegrass can be uncomfortably close to country music. And although it’s an unfair stereotype, country music often makes me think of gun-toting, bible thumping, red state hillbillies who believe you either love this country or you leave it — the sort of beliefs that run counter to those of most San Franciscans.

But my asinine assumptions are even more reasons to go to the show. Last year, an almost plaintive, country voice made me sit up and listen more carefully.

The voice belonged to Iris Dement and her songs made rethink everything I ever assumed about country music.

“Some guy refuses to fight, and we call that the sin
but he’s standing up for what he believes in
and that seems pretty damned American to me
and it feels like I am living in the wasteland of the free”

When she sang “Our Town,” I was surprised find I had tears in my eyes. I know I’m a total sap, but I never expected to feel anything but contempt about a small town.

It’s these sort of experiences (and the chance to witness some truly appalling dancing in the audience) that make me return to Hardly Strictly year after year. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that the festival usually includes some high profile musicians. Last year, Elvis Costello was there. This year, Jeff Tweedy is playing.

How else would I have ever learned about Iris Dement? Where else could I see someone who goes by the first name “T Bone” take the stage? I knew I loved Emmylou’s voice but before Hardly Strictly, I’d never seen her live. Now, I have a standing date with her every year as the sun sets and the fog rolls in.

Rave: Tartine Bakery

This post doesn’t need to be written. After all, it’s common knowledge that Tartine is the City’s best bakery. There were lines stretching down the block every morning, even before Mark Bittman, the New York Times’s food writer, called Tartine his favorite bakery in the whole country.

But it helps to know what to expect — aside from excellent French pastries — when visiting Tartine. It would be a real shame if, say, an unexpectedly long wait to get in the door deterred you.

When I hear the word “bakery”, I think of a cozy place to linger over a latte, or a place for a quick breakfast. Tartine offers neither.

Where you’ll linger is in line, of course. The line is practically unavoidable in the mornings. We’ve been at Tartine right when they open, thinking naively, “Who would be there at 8am on a Monday morning?” The answer? About half the City.

And I can’t blame them. They’re as obsessed as I am with Tartine’s Pain au Jambon (that’s a smoked ham and gruyere cheese croissant, for us non-French speakers), or the morning bun which comes with an unexpected and heavenly hint of orange blossom, or the rich bread pudding topped with whatever fruit is in season.

You are almost always asked for your order before you’ve had a chance to see anything in the glass cases, so either take my advice (above), or Bittman’s, or just scope the website.

If you aren’t enticed by the City’s — perhaps the country’s — best pastries, then you have real problems. But the plus side is that you can go to Tartine in the evenings when the lines diminish. And every evening except Mondays, you can get Tartine’s bread.

The Bay Area has no shortage of bread bakers (off the top of my head, there’s Acme, Semifreddi, Arizmendi, La Farine, Della Fattoria, Grace Baking Co…I’m sure there’s more), but Tartine’s country loaf is head and shoulders above the rest.

Its bread could easily kick any other loaf’s ass on size alone. In fact, there’s probably a decent number of people who simply can’t fit the loaf in their apartment’s kitchen. A small dog will likely consider this loaf a threat.

It’s the size of our largest cutting board and it’s an absolute mess. Cutting this monstronsity produces an insane amount of crumbs. Our counters are freckled with bready bits when we have a loaf in the house, and our feet crunch crumbs into the floor.

But you’ll be happy to have this bread, even though it takes over your kitchen and litters crumbs on your floor. Because this bread is delicious, soft and spongy on the inside, with a crust that challenged all of our knives (and my arm strength) until we received an alarmingly sharp bread knife as a gift.

This bread is terrific plain or with butter, toasted or untoasted, and it transforms any sandwich into a tremendous meal. One of my very favorite lunches is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on Tartine’s country bread. A week ago, I made a sandwich out of the last sandwich-y bits in our fridge: a single slice of turkey, a bit of cheddar, some arugula. And yet on Tartine bread, it made for an excellent, memorable lunch.

Yet another reason to pick up some Tartine bread? When the bread is just out of the oven, it’s quite hot and works as a portable heater. So it’s a particularly good buy on those evenings when you didn’t bring a sweater with you and the fog has rolled in and brought with it a wicked wind.

Police Blotters – September 2007

• At 11:42 a.m., a man called from South C— Street to report peppermint gum was stuck to his car.
• At 8:09 p.m., a caller from a store on the 100 block of West M— Way reported customers in the store’s gun department were causing a disturbance. A woman threw a knife at the caller, then the woman and a man were verbally abusive with the caller. The woman was wearing a straw hat and a fanny pack.
• At 8:27 a.m., a caller from the 600 block of South A— Street reported someone tried to tamper with his car. Someone wrapped wiring around the steering column of his car and may have taken the rug out of the trunk.
• At 12:31 a.m., a caller from the 10000 block of M— Drive reported that a juvenile had come into his residence and was now outside urinating.
• At 3:41 a.m., a caller from the 12000 block of R— Way reported that his neighbor was throwing sand on his roof and skylight.
• At 10:34 a.m., a caller from the 21000 block of P– Road reported that his aunt had kicked him out of the house and wouldn’t let him take his medical marijuana plants with him.
• At 1:21 a.m., a man from the 300 block of B— Street reported multiple subjects “trying to jump him.”
• At 12:17 p.m., a woman from the 12000 block of S— Road reported someone had placed dead animals on her property two times in one week. Animal carcasses were placed in her mailbox and hung from a pole with fishing line, the woman said.
• 7:28 p.m. – A man called from the 300 block of H— Circle to report his flower bulbs were pulled from his garden and thrown into the street within the last hour. The man wanted extra police patrols.
• 10:19 a.m. – A caller reported a woman was acting strange on the side of M— Drive. She was talking to herself, picking up rocks, throwing them and banging the rocks together. A deputy contacted the woman and determined she was hunting for rocks. She was strange but did not meet the requirements for a mental health evaluation.
• 2:27 p.m. – A woman at the Police station reported her former roommates at a home on the 19000 block of J— Road threatened to kill her and would not let her have her cat.
• 8:44 a.m. – A caller from M— Drive reported a woman in a blue Ford Explorer was naked and shaking her breasts at the caller.
• 10:11 a.m. – A caller from the 13000 block of W— Lane reported dead animals were being placed over signs at a learning center.